Brief Hands-On Report--The First Stable Beta of Camino 1.0 is Out

Camino is the Mozilla open source project's Web browser that's Mac OS X Cocoa native. It's available from this Mozilla Web page. According to the Release Notes,

Camino 1.0 Beta 1 brings you a heavily updated version of the only native Mac OS X browser using Mozilla.org's Gecko HTML rendering engine. We made great improvements, adding new features, improving existing features, and fixing many bugs and performance issues.

Note that this version of Camino 1.0 Beta 1 is close to its final shipping state. It is usable on a day-to-day basis and a large improvement over Camino 0.8.4, but you may still experience bugs, or features that are not complete. The goal of this early release is to demonstrate progress, and for people to report issues early on in the development cycle so that they can be addressed.

Camino 1.0 Beta 1 shares the same code base with Firefox 1.5 (it's based on the Mozilla 1.8 CVS branch), so shares many of the security fixes and Gecko improvements that are in that version of Firefox.

It has been awhile since we've used Camino so we downloaded and installed a copy of 1.0b1. Camino installed by simply copying its icon to the Applications folder. It easily imported our bookmarks file from Safari. Camino also imports bookmarks from Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape, Internet Explorer and Opera. Camino can be set to block popup ads and server ads on web pages. It can also be set to eliminate underlining of links for more readable text.

We opened several dozen of our bookmarked web pages and Camino rendered them perfectly and quickly. We can now recommend using Camino as a primary Web browser. [Bill Fox]